‘Critical Grammar’ and the Great Distortion
Rutgers English Department Victimized by Right-Wing Hit
Rutgers English Department Victimized by Right-Wing Hit
Rutgers University’s English Department plans to increase emphasis on grammar through a critical approach designed to make students aware of the choices they make when writing — an effort that runs counter to reports circulating on social media that seemed on fanning the flames of the culture war.
The report, written by a Texas Christian student for a student-run, conservative website called The College Fix, distorted a letter from the department chair that outlined ways in which the English Department is working toward creating an “anti-racist classroom.”
The College Fix piece presents the plan as part of a process of a “decolonization,” using language common on Fox News and conservative websites, and describing it as “an effort to deemphasize traditional grammar rules.” On Fox, one former professor claimed that the changes, in particular efforts to de emphasize grammar, would hurt minority students, following through on a narrative pushed by the conservative spin machine.
The problem is that this narrative is false. It’s based on a distortion and has little to do with what the Rutgers English Department is doing, which is building on a longstanding effort to include more texts from marginalized groups, providing workshops on anti-racist teaching practices, and supporting black and brown faculty and students through mentorships and other arrangements.
The grammar distortion, unfortunately, is the one that is doing the most damage. It stems from a single paragraph — one part of a three-part initiative that will be undertaken by the graduate program. Parts one and two discuss proving workshops and focusing on graduate student life, while the third, the offending one, talks about “Incorporating ‘critical grammar’ into our pedagogy.”
This approach challenges the familiar dogma that writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar/sentence-level issues so as to not put students from multilingual, non-standard “academic” English backgrounds at a disadvantage. Instead, it encourages students to develop a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to them w/ regard to micro-level issues in order to empower them and equip them to push against biases based on “written” accents.
This passage should be clear to anyone who takes the time to read what is written. The “familiar dogma” here is the problem. It assumes that students from multilingual backgrounds will be harmed by a focus on grammar at the expense of broader writing issues. This dogma can leave students without the strong, sentence-level foundation they need to write well. What Rutgers is proposing — and what the letter clearly says — is a shift; it is not proposing to de-emphasize grammar, but to encourage “critical awareness,” or an understanding of the history and development of English grammar, how it works, and the potential impacts of the choices made in the writing process. Rather than lowering the bar, as the critics claim, the department is raising it.
I reached out to the chair of the department, Rebecca Walkowitz, who told me via email that
the effort will result in “more attention to grammar in the aggregate, not less. Our standards remain rigorous and high, and our goal is to help students succeed in academic writing and other writing genres.”
There is nothing new about this approach. The educational jargon — “critical grammar” — may seem foreign, but all writing instruction engages in this kind of effort. I teach both composition and journalism and one of the main things I stress is that students need to think strategically. They need to understand that the choices they make — what details to include and when, what kind of voice to use, even when to violate the basic rules of grammar (as in the use of sentence fragments) — will affect how their work is received.
Languages are not static. They grow and change. The debate over the use of they/them/their as non-gendered, singular pronouns is instructive. They/them/their has a history of use as a singular pronoun, as the Oxford English Dictionary makes clear. This started to change in the 18th Century, when grammarians formalized it as plural-only. However, it has retained its colloquial use as non-gendered singular pronoun and, as questions of gender fluidity and trans-rights arose, it started to be used in this way in more formal writing. This, as I understand it, is a simple example of “critical grammar,” and probably one that is far less sophisticated than what the graduate writers will be studying.
Graduate English students — I did a year as one in the 1980s after getting my Bachelor’s in English from Rutgers — “are more likely to be ready to think about grammar in a historical and comparative context, so it makes sense that we’d talk about the history and development of grammar with them more than with undergraduates,” Walkowitz said. In addition, there are a large number of international students in graduate writing classes “who are using English as a second language,” she said. “It can be useful for them especially to be aware of the development of English and the many different uses of English that operate in the U.S.”
This is not some capitulation to some mythical cadre of radical cultural Marxists, but a sane effort to meet students where they are and to give them what they need to be better writers, which meshes well with other efforts across the university. Writing is a significant focus of the core curriculum in the School of Arts and Sciences, and courses that are to be certified as meeting the core have to meet detailed and exacting requirements. I teach one of those courses — Writing for Media in the Journalism and Media Studies Department — and I can attest to the emphasis placed on English grammar and usage.
What this episode demonstrates is how utterly bankrupt conservative media is and how inept we have become as news readers in judging the content we see online. The College Fix story was poorly sourced: It was based on a single link and included a nod to reaching out to Rutgers, though it is unclear how serious that effort was. It distorted the language in the letter itself, which then influenced many readers to engage in the same kind of misreading. And, finally, it went viral because it confirmed the biases of a specific cohort of readers — not just conservatives, but liberals and moderates who have made it their mission to knock the “woke left.”
(Here is a link to a Reddit thread on which several Rutgers English majors weigh in.)
I’ll try to update this as I get more information on the other aspects of the program.